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Assistant Professor, Engineering and Public Policy
Geography of design; international technology and operations management; and innovation and industrial policy.
S.B. (Materials Science and Engineering), 1999, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
S.M. (Technology Policy), 2003, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ph.D. (Engineering Systems), 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Professor Fuchs is interested in the geography of design, international technology and operations management, and innovation and industrial policy. She currently has two main streams of research. Her first stream of research looks at the impact of manufacturing offshore on the technology development path of the firm and the industry. Here, she has studied two cases of emerging technologies . advanced composites in automobiles and integration in optoelectronic components. In both cases, her results show that when US firms shift production from the US to countries like China, often the most advanced technologies that were developed here no longer pay. Factor costs are different abroad, and earlier technologies can be more cost-effective in countries like China. Among other issues, this leaves the most advanced technologies abandoned, and, in the case of the optoelectronics industry, creates a barrier to ever returning production to the US. Dr. Fuchs.s second stream of research studies the social processes influencing technology trajectories. Here, she is once again studying information technology, in particular, microprocessors. This work currently focuses on two main areas — the coordination of innovation among key industry architects, and the processes by which the government seeds and encourages new technology trajectories within this framework.
Dr. Fuchs has maintained an interest in technology development and international operations throughout her career. While working on her S.B. in Materials Science and Engineering at M.I.T., she interned at a steel company in northern Sweden and did her undergraduate thesis with Bayer Corporation in Germany. After graduating, she worked for the United Nations in Beijing, China, on policies to encourage innovation in state-owned industrial boiler manufacturers. After returning to M.I.T. for her S.M., she became intrigued by differences in the automotive industry’s design decisions in the U.S. versus those they made in China. A subsequent internship at a start-up in Silicon Valley led to her current investigations in the optoelectronics industry. Her has work won MIT’s “Best Technology and Policy Masters Thesis” in 2003 and “Best Doctoral Presentation” at the 2005 Annual Technology Management and Policy Doctoral Consortium. In 2005-2006 she was designated an Alfred P. Sloan fellow at the MIT Industrial Performance Center. Dr. Fuchs is fluent in German and has a strong oral command of Mandarin.
Representative Publications
2006 Fuchs, E., Bruce, E., Ram, R., and Kirchain, R. Process-Based Cost Modeling of Photonics Manufacture: The Cost-Competitiveness of Monolithic Integration of a 1550nm DFB Laser and an Electro-Absorptive Modulator on an InP Platform. Journal of Lightwave Technology. 24(8): 3175-3186.
2005 Fuchs, E., and Kirchain, R. Changing Paths: The Impact of Manufacturing Off-Shore on Technology Development Incentives in the Optoelectronics Industry. Proceedings of 2005 Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management. Aug 5-10. Honolulu, Hawaii.
2002 Veloso, Francisco and Fuchs, E. The Future of the Asian Auto Industry: Regional Integration, Alternative Designs, and Chinese Leadership. International Journal of Vehicle Design. 35(1): 111-136.
Personal Website
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